


the bear and the maiden fair

by erolyn2



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Divergence, F/M, characters and pairings will be added as they appear, rebellion AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 03:25:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erolyn2/pseuds/erolyn2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robert's Rebellion-era AU. Dany and Rhaegar's birth order is switched; she is King Aerys Targaryen's firstborn, her brother Viserys the heir to the Iron Throne. Trapped in a loveless marriage to Robert Baratheon, Dany seeks a way out, and when an unknown lord from the North begs her favor at the tourney at Harrenhal she thinks she may have found it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the bear and the maiden fair

**Author's Note:**

> The basic premise here is that everything is the same as it was in canon except that Dany and Rhaegar are switched. It's 281 AL; Dany is around 22, Jorah around 26. Dany is married to Robert Baratheon and has been for a few years. Jorah's first wife has recently died in childbirth (possibly a few years earlier than canon). Other betrothals/political situations will be clarified later, but for the most part I have changed as little as possible.

Daenerys had been sitting in the stands for hours when the jousting finally commenced.

It was a warm day, the sun beating down as though in mockery of her and the wine she’d consumed the previous evening. Tourneys were an excellent excuse to leave Storm’s End, a chance to escape her husband and enjoy the company of others for a few hours, but sitting in the heat watching men knock each other from their horses while her arse grew sorer and sorer atop a hard wooden bench was _not_ her idea of entertainment. Though grander than most, the tourney at Harrenhal was shaping up to be yet another pissing contest between her father’s knights. _Will it be Barristan or Arthur this time? Does anyone in the kingdom give a shit anymore?_

Lost in her musing, Dany did not see the man riding up to her until he was nearly there. A large fellow, dark, his unimpressive face and armor out of place amongst the shining knights around him. _Not a knight, surely_ – some Lord, perhaps, come to try his luck. When he asked for her favor, she nearly blanched with shock.

 _I called for a knight, but you’re a bear._ How often had her drunken husband bellowed the words to the tavern bawdy in the halls of the palace? And now here before her sat a man with a bear sigil stitched across his chest.

 _Of all people…why couldn’t it have been Ser Jaime?_ She had been eyeing the Lannister boy in the lists all morning. His bright armor and golden mane alike reflected the midday light, and for the first time she regretted that her father had turned down Tywin Lannister’s offer to join their houses. Jaime had been a boy of ten at the time, and Dany had been glad to escape a child husband, but she had to admit that the child was growing into a fine man. He had been named to her father’s Kingsguard only two days ago, the youngest man ever to be so honored. Every eye in Harrenhal was on the Hand’s son today.

Jaime had hardly turned to face the crowds at all, though, and when he did his eyes were all for his twin sister.

 _For the best_ , she thought. _I might as well have waited for Viserys._

Her husband was off somewhere preparing for the melee, and even had he been at her side Daenerys might still have given her favor to the bear lord just to watch his face turn the color of a ripe tomato. Robert’s fury was terrible, but at least it was an emotion he would direct entirely to her.

She studied the lord with the bear sigil as she handed her favor over to him. He was much closer to her age then Jaime, but had none of the boy’s easy beauty and gallantry. Though he might have made up for it in sheer _size,_ she realized, studying his wide shoulders. Truly, he resembled the animal etched on his heraldry to an amusing degree.

 _I called for a knight_ …

Dany could not even recall which House he belonged to, but he must have been a Northman. She could have named any of the lords from the Eyrie to Dorne and everywhere between just by their colors – and recognized most by their faces – but north of the Neck she began to lose track of the banners.

 _Brandon would know. Where is he?_ Lord Stark’s son often came to her at tourneys, at feasts, whenever they found themselves in the same castle at the same time. She liked Brandon Stark’s cocksure charm, the air of wildness that clung to him and his brothers, and though she knew she was little more than a pretty arse to him, he was a better lover than Robert could have ever hoped to be. On the occasions she managed to sneak off with the Stark heir, part of her always hoped she might present her husband with a wolf pup nine moons later.

Her father might have wed her to Brandon, or to Oberyn Martell, or to one of Leyton Hightower’s army of sons. _Anyone else._ But Steffon Baratheon’s sons were closest to House Targaryen in blood, only two generations removed from Rhaelle Targaryen, Dany’s great-aunt, and only that fact had convinced Aerys not to leave his daughter unwed until little Viserys came of age. _I’d have been near thirty by then. A maiden princess in a tower, like the sisters of Baelor the Blessed._

She had gotten a husband instead, just as she had wanted. A husband who drank and whored and whispered the name of another woman in her ears at night and still had the nerve to be angry when another man looked her way.

No one had dared, until now. Not in front of such a crowd.                             

 _Bold_ , she thought, tying the knot around her champion’s arm, _or perhaps just arrogant and foolhardy. Either way…_

She had never heard of him before, never seen him at a tourney or anywhere else, and yet her bear lord rose through the lists as though he had jousted all his life. Dany watched as he unhorsed one challenger after another. She laughed to see Brandon hit the ground arse-first, winced when Ser Barristan Selmy – a favorite of hers among her father’s Kingsguard – was unseated, gasped along with the crowd when the Sword of the Morning fell.

 _Luck._ It had to be luck. And yet as she watched him, her heart beat faster than it had in years. In the end it was only her lord against Ser Jaime, and perhaps only Jaime’s youthful overconfidence that made them near-evenly matched.

When it was over he rode back to her to return her favor, a knotted circlet of red roses in his hands. She examined him more closely than before; not handsome, she decided, but Robert had been handsome when she married him, and pretty Jaime Lannister had ended in the dirt.

“If I am to be your Queen,” she said as he placed the crown upon her head, “perhaps you ought to give me your name.”

He replied slowly, looking a bit dazed – too many knocks from a lance, or perhaps he was simply as astonished by his victory as everyone else.

“Lord Jorah Mormont, of Bear Island.”

 _Bear Island?_ That explained the sigil, at least, but she struggled to remember where that was. _Somewhere north. Far, far north._ That was all she could remember, but that was all Dany needed.

_As far from here as I can get._

-

Somehow she managed to get a note to him; after the day’s feasting was done, and he’d drunk nearly his weight in wine - or at least felt as though he had - Jorah stumbled back to his rooms to find a stray parchment on the table with a message scrawled in tiny, curling script.

_I will be waiting in the Godswood._

She had to mean tonight. Did she mean tonight? Again he cursed himself for drinking so much at that damned feast; the last thing he wanted was to appear before the princess of Westeros wavering and slurring his words.

Not that he was like to speak eloquently to her sober. That afternoon he’d barely managed his name and title, and that without a drop of wine all day.

 _The princess._ It had been a stupid thing to do, to ride up to the King’s daughter that way – Aerys Targaryen’s _married daughter_ – but the moment he saw her every thought had left Jorah Mormont’s brain. All but one. _The maiden, come to life._

It was the last thing he ought to have been thinking. He’d come to Harrenhal on a whim, for no more reason than to escape the hall that had become more chokingly dreary than ever in the weeks following his wife’s death. They had never loved one another, not truly, not beyond companionship and vague mutual affection and the shared pain of losing child after child, and playing the loving husband, disguising the truth –that he grieved for her, for the babe that had perished within her, but not _enough_ – had worn him down to the bone.

Rickard Stark had brought his sons to Bear Island offer condolences, as was proper, and Brandon and Ned had told Jorah that Lord Whent’s tourney was like to be the grandest in ages.

He’d attended few tourneys before, and competed in fewer still – after all, he was no knight, only the Lord of an island that lay closer to Wildling territory than to the rest of Westeros – but after trying to explain to little Aly for the fifth time that Erena was not on a journey and would not be coming back, he nearly leapt at the chance to flee his cramped hall full of children. _And Maege pregnant again_ …

He had come to Harrenhal to escape women, and now he’d wound up arranging secret meetings with the princess.

Jorah waited as long as he could, trying desperately to clear the haze from his mind, and finally set out in search of the gnarled oak that stood in place of a heart tree in the South. The charred walls of the castle were more foreboding than ever in the darkness, a clear reminder what a man could expect when he tangled with _Targaryens._ It took him a long time to make his way around the ruins; whether the culprit was the wine or the sprawling maze of blackened stone, he did not know, and when he finally pushed through the grove of trees to the clearing in its center, he half-expected the princess to have given up and left.

Yet there she was, just as she had promised, and just as beautiful in the shadows as she had been in daylight.

“Lord Mormont.”

As they had that afternoon, all his thoughts flew away at the sight of her; later he would realize he must have stood gaping like an idiot for a very long time before he remembered his manners and bowed low before her.

“Princess.”

“I believe I am a Queen now, am I not? Thanks to you and your crown of roses.”

When he looked up she was smiling at him, her face brightening the dark night. _The maiden._ Even in his drunken haze he knew that thought was wrong; though she looked innocent in the light of the moon, Daenerys Targaryen was _not_ a maiden. This was the wife of Robert Baratheon, a proud and vengeful lord, and the daughter of the King. _A dragon_ , he thought again, glancing at the walls above.

The silence stretched on; she appeared to be waiting for him to speak first, so Jorah attempted words again. “You summoned me here.” To his dismay, they had come out more gruff than he intended. _Don’t scare her off._ He cleared his throat and tried again, in what he hoped was a more courtly tone. “What do you wish of me?”

She studied him carefully, a decision forming in her eyes.

“I wish to leave.”

“To leave Harrenhal?” She hardly needed _his_ assistance for that. “Why not go to your husband–”

“I wish to leave my husband.”

Jorah could only stand gaping like a fool again. No woman simply _left_ her husband. Not in Westeros. It could not be because of him – though his heart paused a beat at the thought – he had only just met her. If he recalled correctly, she had been married to Robert for some years, and Rickard Stark’s sons had only praise for the man.“You – forgive me, princess, but _why_?”

“Because he is a drunken brute. Because he brings whores into our bed and shouts at any man who looks at me. Because I do not love him, and if I am forced to spend the rest of my years as his wife I will…”

Even drunk as he was, Jorah knew it was wrong to approach her, but the crack in her voice made it so difficult to stand still. With all his patience he waited, let her gather herself and continue.

“I want to leave, and I want you to come with me.”

 _Come with me._ Run away with me, she meant. To the rest of the kingdom – to _Robert Baratheon_ – it would look as though he had stolen her, coerced her, _raped_ her perhaps. Why else would the princess run off with a minor lord, a man she’d known hardly a full day?

 “What you are asking me to do is treason.”

“They will call it that, yes.” She sighed, her expression more resolute than ever. _A dragon._ “I cannot go on my own, and I cannot stay. I need protection. All the knights I know are in Robert’s employ, or my father’s. No matter the love they hold for me, they will not disobey. But you…”

The princess was smiling again in a way that made him uneasy, her feet bringing her nearer to where he stood.

“You made me your Queen. Now be my knight.” She was standing very close to him now, close enough that he could smell her hair as she moved – not a flowery scent, as other ladies often wore, just _her_ , clean and clear, like water. When her tiny hands pressed against his chest and he felt her lips against his cheek, he stopped breathing entirely.

“Rescue me.”

How could he say no to that little voice in his ear, to the wide violet eyes beseeching him as though he were her only hope, to this woman whose desperation reminded him so much of the quiet, shy girl who had looked up at him on their wedding day, who had died in the arms of a husband who had never loved her.

All Jorah could do was nod slowly, and slink back to his rooms wondering what in the seven hells he’d gotten himself into.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to mrstater for beta-ing. :)


End file.
